DPL Reading List – December 21, 2018

7 of the year’s best books on tech – “It was the tech industry’s ugliest year yet. Fortunately, there were also big books that schooled us on where we stand in the context of a larger era. They covered everything from the patriarchal foundations of the tech industry to clipped-winged unicorns and the next space race.”

Jingle Bits: Auditory Maintenance, Whirlwind Holiday Songs & the Dawn of Computer Music – “While the operational machine is long gone, there are many pieces of it, and associated materials, preserved in the collections of the Computer History Museum (CHM), the Smithsonian, and the MIT Museum. CHM preserves some 1,000 punched paper tapes of Whirlwind software and data, believed to date exclusively from 1949 to 1959, with 1953 the earliest identified tape. CHM and the MIT Museum have launched a joint research project on these tapes, digitally preserving their contents and developing means to explore them, and in the course of this exploration came across one labeled “Jingle Bells.” Based on our research of this tape, and the Whirlwind program that it contains, we believe that it is a post-1953 version of the “Jingle Bells” song program first known to have been played for the December 1951 Murrow program.”

Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died this week—she should be remembered – “Computing pioneer Evelyn Berezin died at 93 this week. She was most known as the designer of the first true word-processing computer. But she designed many other innovative computing systems and helmed Redactron Corporation, a company that helped transform offices by producing and distributing her word-processor device.”

SplashData’s Top 100 Worst Passwords of 2018 – “Each year, SplashData evaluates millions of leaked passwords to determine which passwords were most used by computer users during that year. Even with the risks well known, many millions of people continue to use weak, easily-guessable passwords to protect their online information.”

Need to remember something? Draw it – “As we get older, our memory really does get worse. It can be hard in our private lives and professional ones. But new research from the University of Waterloo has discovered a compelling fix: By drawing something, rather than taking written notes, our memory performs as well as that of someone decades younger. Truthfully, though, people of all ages remember better by drawing. So if you want to remember something, draw it.”

Adobe XD: putting auto-animate to the test – “As Adobe describes it — Adobe XD has evolved from a basic click-through application to providing you divergent prototyping options such as Time, Tap, Drag, and Voice. Designers can use auto-animate combined with drag gestures to create micro-interactions across art-boards for rich prototype experiences such as on-boarding flows, animations for carousels, cards and lists or progress indicators.”